Emotional Intelligence & THE ORGANIZATION OF NEEDS

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) pyramid

Humanistic theories are concerned with defining the needs that are central to human functioning. Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), one of the early and influential humanistic thinkers, described human needs in terms of a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are the fundamentally physiological needs for food, air, water, and sex. Further up are needs for safety, love, esteem, and so on, up to self-actualization. Individuals organizetheir lives around these needs, trying to gratify the needs at each level.As each of the lower needs becomes gratified, more needs higher on the pyramidemerge and require fulfillment. If at any level, our needs are not gratified,conflict ensues. Until the conflict is resolved, we do not proceed to thenext level. Moreover, iflower needs cease to be satisfied, regression to lowerlevels will occur until the lower needs are again being satisfied.We first attempt to gratify our need for food. What we do in life is organizedaround ways to achieve this goal. Once achieved, we go on to the nextneed, the need for safety, and in doing so, we organize our life differently.Once safety needs are gratified, needs for love, affection, and belongingnessemerge. Now the person feels keenly, as never before, the absence offriends,sweetheart, spouse, or children. These needs can be very intense and candominate personality and motivation. The absence of love and affection is seen as a major contributor to conflict and unhappiness. Until these needsare gratified, the individual cannot proceed to the next level: the need foresteem. Once the individual achieves competence, approval, and recognition,thereby satisfying the need for esteem, he will proceed on to the level ofaesthetic and cognitive needs. These growth needs include the search forknowledge, understanding, justice, beauty, order, and symmetry. Finally, atthe top level of the pyramid, the needs for self-fulfillment and self-actualizationwill emerge, the "desire to become more and more of what one is, tobecome everything that one is capable of becoming" (Maslow, 1968, p. 92).

Those at the top of the pyramid, self-actualizing people, tend to acceptthemselves and others. They have a nonhostile sense of humor and appreciatethe novel and unexpected. They tend to be problem-centered rather thanego-centered, concerned with problems that exist outside of themselves.They have a mission in life. They like solitude more than most people, yetthey experience deep feelings of empathy, affection, and identification withothers. Because their fundamental needs have been gratified, they aregrowth- rather than deficiency-motivated, and they tend therefore to be relativelyautonomous of their environment.

Self-actualizing people, however, are not without problems and conflicts.They experience anxiety, guilt, sadness, self-castigation, conflict, and so on.But for the most part, these experiences do not arise from deficiency-motivatedsources. Rather, life itself is often difficult and sad, and that fact is reflectedin the lives of self-actualizing people, as in the lives of all others.Attention to self, to feeling and experiencing, and to the organization ofneeds is what centrally marks the thinking of humanistic psychologists. Infact, these concerns shade over imperceptibly to those of the existential psychologists.For that reason, humanistic and existential are often hyphenated.We turn now to the issues of concern to existential psychologists,bearing in mind that no sharp distinction exists between their views andthose of the humanists.